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    Pacific
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    Pacific
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    Pacific
    Audiobook6 hours

    Pacific

    Written by Tom Drury

    Narrated by James Lloyd

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

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    About this audiobook

    In a triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago, Tom Drury travels back to Grouse County, the setting of his landmark debut, The End of Vandalism. Drury’s depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Auster.

    When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother, who deserted him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom. He does new drugs with new people, falls in love with an enchanting but troubled equestrienne named Charlotte, and gets thrown out of school over the activities of a club called the New Luddites.

    Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets-including Micah’s half-sister, Lyris, who still fights fears of abandonment after a childhood in foster care, and Micah’s father, Tiny, a petty thief. An investigation into the stranger’s identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and the everyday, unfold in both the country and the city.

    A portrait of two disparate communities united by the restlessness and desperate hope of their residents, Drury’s haunted souls, adrift between promise and circumstance, reveal our infinite capacity to “get in and out of trouble in unexpected ways” and still find a semblance of peace at the end.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackstone Audio
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9781482101171

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    Reviews for Pacific

    4.5/5

    19 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Once again Tom Drury leads us into the world of Charles “Tiny” Darling, his former wife, Joan, and their two children, Lyris and Micah. Joan is now living in California and Micah is heading out to live with her. Lyris has started her own life with Albert Robeshaw, but she is periodically mothered by Tiny’s first wife, Louise, who is now married to Dan Norman, the former sheriff. Their lives entwine and go their separate ways. Joy and sadness, infidelity and faithfulness mingle. Violence and disappointment sometimes erupt. And underneath is a swift current of myth or madness.Drury has settled in to his style in this novel. He moves easily between his characters, unsurprised by the sometimes surprising things they say. If he is sometimes lost, he is no more lost than his characters, especially Micah and Tiny. And as ever, there is a general feeling that this just might be the way life really is, in spite of the almost palpable love that seems to surround everyone. Maybe it’s just the way Drury wishes life were.Warmly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Not quite as good to me as the two books prior to this one but glad to know how the characters had advanced. I can't imagine someone reading this without having read the earlier works, it would have seemed pretty empty on its own.
    • 5/5
      I got this book from Goodreads First Reads. Thanks!

      Pacific just moved to the top of my list in 2013. In fact, it is one of the best books (fiction) I have read in a while, apart from some stellar short stories by the likes of Carver, Munro, Smiley, and Cheever. I have been in a short story kick lately, and though Pacific is a novel, it somehow works well with the short-story theme. As others have pointed out, Drury has a Carver-esque style, which is to say that he successfully employs a dry, non-flowery prose with succinct, yet insightful language. The book is written in short, episodic moments that describe a few minutes to several hours of events in characters' lives. All stories are focused around a couple (Joan and Tiny, who are no longer together) and their children (Lyris and Micah) and the various people they interact with.

      Drury has a knack for dialog, and an astute eye for the mundane. He captures the strange and regular with the same precision. The contrast between LA/CA and midwest is sharp. And there are no massively broken families here, just what one would consider regular people (maybe with the exception of one person, who seems rather mentally disturbed) with regular problems and lives. What's exceptional is that Drury captures a range of lives, from teenagers coming of age to the elderly living what may be their last few years, with remarkable finesse. In the end, life goes on, despite the sword fights and magical stones and petty thievery and a first kiss...

      Recommended for those who like goats, pot (as in weed), Risk (the board game), Celtic mythology, and taxidermy.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant.
    • 5/5
      Pacific is the story of interesting personalities independently described by their conversations, thoughts, and seemingly incidental actions. Tom Drury introduces most of the major characters in the first chapter in short vignettes, and the reader must pay close attention to them to understand the present and evolving connections. The sparse dialogue and introspections are presented in brief glimpses of rough and tumble Tiny and his somewhat tentative teen son Micah, Dan the ex-police chief and his earthy artisan wife Louise, Joan an actress who plays a mystic on TV and is the mother of Micah, and Lyris Joan’s stoical daughter who was placed for adoption as a young child. The initial setting is in rural Grouse County, a bare stage for the players to interact. The major action is Joan’s return to the rural area to collect her abandoned Micah (not Lyris) and transport him to Los Angeles to live with her current husband and their son Eamon.An epigram preceding the first chapter is from the third of four interrelated tales of Celtic mythology and legend called, The Mabinogion, in which the tribal origins and migration of ancient Celts have been told through the centuries. The oral history stories of gods, kings, warriors, artisans, and mystics show the resilient nature of the ancient culture and reveal the residual characteristics of the descendants from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The reader is alerted by the epigram to the importance of every statement, question, and thought of Tiny, Micah, Dan, Louise, Joan, and Lyris that indicate the archetypal connection between the characters. The strong attachment of the characters to their environment is brought into focus by Sandra, an apparent mentally ill woman obsessed by Celtic tradition who is on a quest to find a stone with supernatural powers that will help her to find the portal to the Otherworld. There she will be able to retrieve and relive her present personal and ancient tribal history. Sandra is both aided and thwarted by her childhood friend, John, a criminal sellout who has abandoned the mystical interests he shared with Sandra for his current efforts to sell fake Celtic artifacts. Sandra seeks the power of the Celtic Otherworld while John seeks mundane financial gain from schemes he developed in prison. The reader feels the power of Celtic myths uniting the characters in their apparently unwitting conversations, thoughts, and actions. The novel is short in the number of pages but long in the stimulation of our own personal and collective memories, real and imagined. Personal and ancient themes in the novel’s stories create strong emotions in the reader related to aggression for honor, sacrifice for freedom, abandonment for destruction, tolerance for survival, courage for enlightenment, and boundless love for power. The themes are great catalysts for reader emotional reactions that quickly lose their power of reminiscence as we put the book down. The novel is a process that is marked by reader’s unexpected insight and then rapid loss of details (like a dream) as the bookmark travels through the pages.Pacific is a wonderful novel, certainly a 5 star book that I recommend highly if you want to search for the Otherworld in yourself and in your connections with others past and present.
    • 5/5
      I loved Pacific. I loved getting back in touch with the characters from Grouse County—I realized I have been missing them for years. And I love Drury's writing: not a syllable out of place. Each section a prose poem.
    • 5/5
      If you can someone who can write better endings than Drury, drop me a line. This is the third in the Grouse County series. End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams and now Pacific which came out last year. The world could be said to be darker and more twisted, there are drugs and more violence but is it really? No one really has much of a clue, they just do things and yet are suddenly capable of heroics, or maybe something a notch short of that but still it's a kind of pluck. The narrator is extraordinarily charming and you are constantly asking yourself - how can Drury do this? how can get away with it. In some ways the arbitrary actions remind me of Joy Williams though seem less informed by the unconscious. Yet the surprises are there even though you have Dan and Tiny, even Micah for a while. Drury is also a master of dialogue. It's all very low key and yet you not only avidly follow along but become invested. HIs world view is so convincing you carry it out of the book and begin to look at people you know with the same generosity. Everyone is damaged but not necessarily unrepairable. People are seemingly captives of their "character" and yet still surprise themselves with some capacity for kindness or understanding that renders them astonishingly attractive, since we too, hope we have some secret capability. Magic is a hideously unscientific word but Drury feels fresh as if he is capable of being surprised and its infectious. The world in Drury's books is born every second.